GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
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GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
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Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#2Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#3Excellent. GitHub is in my opinion crossing a whole pile of lines here that should not have been crossed without the authors explicit permission, regardless of the utility of the tool they built. Copyright is not something that can be signed over by a terms-of-use change of a hosting provider, the expectation is that your host does not automatically claim the rights to anything that you store there.
Such projects should always be opt-in, not just because it is the law but also because it is common sense and the right thing to do from an ethical perspective.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#4This seems to ignore the widely repeated claim that GitHub's terms of service explicitly grant them a license beyond the actual open source license attached to the code and thus transfer the burden of liability to the uploader when it comes to code they can not control the licensing of.
So either this is about code authored by people who did not use GitHub (in which case GitHub would be immediately liable, though they could try to sue whoever uploaded that code to GitHub for damages) or it's going to have to argue that the terms of service can't smuggle in a provision that effectively sidesteps even the most permissive open source licenses.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#5Excellent. GitHub is in my opinion crossing a whole pile of lines here that should not have been crossed without the authors explicit permission, regardless of the utility of the tool they built. Copyright is not something that can be signed over by a terms-of-use change of a hosting provider, the expectation is that your host does not automatically claim the rights to anything that you store there. Such projects sho…
I just hope it doesn't end in Microsoft paying some (from their perspective) small fine that is just the cost of doing business.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#6I’m surprised it’s taken this long to see something like this on HN.
Maybe something like this could be a propellant for legitimate copyright reform.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#7Excellent. GitHub is in my opinion crossing a whole pile of lines here that should not have been crossed without the authors explicit permission, regardless of the utility of the tool they built. Copyright is not something that can be signed over by a terms-of-use change of a hosting provider, the expectation is that your host does not automatically claim the rights to anything that you store there. Such projects sho…
I just hope it doesn't end in Microsoft paying some (from their perspective) small fine that is just the cost of doing business.
The range of possible outcomes is enormous, I'll just wait by the sidelines but cherish the thought that moving out of GitHub when Microsoft bought it was the right decision. They can't be trusted, this has been proven over and over again and yet people keep falling for it. It's the fox guarding the chickens. I wrote about my misgivings at the time:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/what-is-wrong-with-microsoft-buy...
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#8Excellent. GitHub is in my opinion crossing a whole pile of lines here that should not have been crossed without the authors explicit permission, regardless of the utility of the tool they built. Copyright is not something that can be signed over by a terms-of-use change of a hosting provider, the expectation is that your host does not automatically claim the rights to anything that you store there. Such projects sho…
I just hope it doesn't end in Microsoft paying some (from their perspective) small fine that is just the cost of doing business.
But why stop there? What's the difference between Microsoft, Google, Meta, and OpenAI in this regard?
All of those build their models based on the same sources and it's therefore a much more general issue than just one particular company being sued.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#9If it reaches a decision, I’m curious how it will affect “education”. If you study a hundred repos to learn how to do a thing, and then produce something of your own that happens to be similar (because that’s how you learned), are you under any particular obligations?
One hopes Oracle et al are not further inspired by such an outcome.
Re: GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
#10Steve Ballmer once called Linux and the GPL License a cancer because to copy a portion of code from a copyleft project, minimal as it may be, would make the whole project require a copyleft license.
If Github Co-Pilot includes GPL code then produced works should have GPL too, right? It is known that it produces verbatim copies of sections of code, so the 'derivative' explanation doesn't hold water.
Alternatives may be to copy CC0-only (which can't be guaranteed, also who'd believe you lol) or target license-only - as in, if my project is MIT, go with MIT projects to source from, if I'm GPL, include GPL and so on.